Plato was talking about the general question of which the following are also examples (tokens actually!), “Why do all triangles resemble each other?” “Why do all storms resemble each other?” “Why do all performances of Oedipus resemble each other?” and so on. And he’s not looking for a causal explanation, he’s trying to understand what our categories are doing and what it means to refer to different things by the same name.
Well, I think that’s giving Plato too much credit—my claim is that, at the time, they weren’t even aware of how their categorizations were influencing their judgments. But your comparison to the triangle question is very apt. According what I read in Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the Western ontology from Greeks through to the 19th century was that all animals represent a special, ideal, “platonic” form.
To claim, as Darwin did, that animals changed forms over time sounded to them, like it would sound to us if someone argued, “Okay, you know all those integers we use? Well, they weren’t always that way. They kinda changed over time. That 3 and 4 we have? See, they actually used to be a 3.5. Then over time it split into 3.2 and 3.8, eventually reaching the 3 and 4 we have today.”
In short, the Greeks didn’t recognize the hidden inferences that words were making and thought they were finding objective categories when really they were creating human-useful categories. EY goes into detail about this in the article AnnaSalamon referenced, Words as Hidden Inferences.
Yet the brain goes on about its work of categorization, whether or not we consciously approve. “All humans are mortal, Socrates is a human, therefore Socrates is mortal”—thus spake the ancient Greek philosophers. Well, if mortality is part of your logical definition of “human”, you can’t logically classify Socrates as human until you observe him to be mortal. But—this is the problem—Aristotle knew perfectly well that Socrates was a human. Aristotle’s brain placed Socrates in the “human” category as efficiently as your own brain categorizes tigers, apples, and everything else in its environment: Swiftly, silently, and without conscious approval.
So what I think you’re saying is that Plato had so much map-territory confusion that what he had to say about forms isn’t even a meaningful question. Is that right?
I might agree. It’s hard to figure out how ancient philosophers were actually thinking about problems given that we only approach their work through modernized translations and with our own concepts and categories at hand.
I’m not sure I see Plato inferring from words, though. Maybe you can point out that step explicitly?
Part of the problem is that “Words as Hidden Inferences” doesn’t make that much sense to me as it stands, particularly as it relates to Greek philosophy. Eliezer’s example is at the very least poorly chosen. Aristotle didn’t even necessarily believe that humans are mortal, he seems agnostic on that question. The quote “All humans are mortal, Socrates is a human, therefore Socrates is mortal” isn’t an argument for anyone’s mortality. It’s an example of a logical syllogism. “All humans are mortal” and “Socrates is a human” are just premises designed to illustrate the form. They might as well be made in set notation.
Aristotle believed bodies inevitably die, if I recall. That maybe a wrong judgment but an inference based mostly on observation (or at least based on general theories which were based on observation but unfortunately not much experimentation). He thought that the part of the soul that thinks might be able to live on after the body but that at least some of the soul was dependent upon the body (note that Aristotle’s soul isn’t at all like the Platonic/Christian conception we’re familiar with and could charitably but plausibly be updated into something people here would be comfortable identifying as a person sans body).
So what I think you’re saying is that Plato had so much map-territory confusion that what he had to say about forms isn’t even a meaningful question. Is that right?
No, I agree there was a meaningful question there: “why have the things we (historically) labeled as ‘dogs’ seem so similar to us?” And you can meaingfully answer that question, in a way that improves your map of the world, by looking at how things got into the dog category in the first place, and why that category (regardless of name) even exists.
While I admit I don’t have special expertise on Greek philosophy in this area, I do know that they had not gathered enough evidence at that point to even be asking questions that require knowledge of evolution to answer, and that they were hung up on idealism (as opposed to nominalism) which forces you to think in terms of ideal forms rather than models that identify relevant clusters.
So perhaps EY’s characterization of the situation misled me, but the essential features are still there to support my claim that Plato went astray by not recognizing the source of the classification-as-dog.
I see. I guess we were disagreeing with Anna for somewhat different reasons. Your point is that when Plato was considering the question “why do the things we call dogs resemble each other” the concept the English word dog references was just a folk concept that was applied to some things that looked the same- the causal-historical story for how those things came to look the way they do is irrelevant to the fact they’re called the same thing just because our brains classify them the same way.
I think thats right. My point was that Plato didn’t really care about dogs so much. What he cared about was this phenomenon of resemblance. The question wasn’t so much how did discrete individuals (Lassie and Snoopy) come to exist in a way that resemble each other. Rather, the question is “We call both Lassie and Snoopy ‘dogs’ and yet they are different individuals. What then is the relation between ‘dog’ and Lassie/Snoopy and what are we doing when we call both Lassie and Snoopy dogs? But that might be more the entire tradition of Western philosophy talking rather than Plato himself.
Plato’s answer though is that there are abstract objects, “forms” which are imperfectly instantiated in Lassie and Snoopy. Both approximate ideal ‘dogness’. For Plato it was these forms that were ‘most real’ so to speak because they were eternal and perfect. Plato, and especially some of his later followers got really mystical about all this and it got imported into Christianity. But we can excise the mysticism/silly talk about perfection and get a live philosophical question (the most notable Platonist of the 20th century is Bertrand Russell). A modern version of the question might be “what is the ontological status of abstract objects?” At best evolution and genetics are only tangentially involved with that question and only for a subset of abstract objects (things like species) and as a whole the question is generally considered unsolved. As it stands nominalism and Platonism have about equal representation among philosophers as a whole, though Platonism has a slight advantage among those who do work in Metaphysics.
Well, I think that’s giving Plato too much credit—my claim is that, at the time, they weren’t even aware of how their categorizations were influencing their judgments. But your comparison to the triangle question is very apt. According what I read in Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the Western ontology from Greeks through to the 19th century was that all animals represent a special, ideal, “platonic” form.
To claim, as Darwin did, that animals changed forms over time sounded to them, like it would sound to us if someone argued, “Okay, you know all those integers we use? Well, they weren’t always that way. They kinda changed over time. That 3 and 4 we have? See, they actually used to be a 3.5. Then over time it split into 3.2 and 3.8, eventually reaching the 3 and 4 we have today.”
In short, the Greeks didn’t recognize the hidden inferences that words were making and thought they were finding objective categories when really they were creating human-useful categories. EY goes into detail about this in the article AnnaSalamon referenced, Words as Hidden Inferences.
So what I think you’re saying is that Plato had so much map-territory confusion that what he had to say about forms isn’t even a meaningful question. Is that right?
I might agree. It’s hard to figure out how ancient philosophers were actually thinking about problems given that we only approach their work through modernized translations and with our own concepts and categories at hand.
I’m not sure I see Plato inferring from words, though. Maybe you can point out that step explicitly?
Part of the problem is that “Words as Hidden Inferences” doesn’t make that much sense to me as it stands, particularly as it relates to Greek philosophy. Eliezer’s example is at the very least poorly chosen. Aristotle didn’t even necessarily believe that humans are mortal, he seems agnostic on that question. The quote “All humans are mortal, Socrates is a human, therefore Socrates is mortal” isn’t an argument for anyone’s mortality. It’s an example of a logical syllogism. “All humans are mortal” and “Socrates is a human” are just premises designed to illustrate the form. They might as well be made in set notation.
Aristotle believed bodies inevitably die, if I recall. That maybe a wrong judgment but an inference based mostly on observation (or at least based on general theories which were based on observation but unfortunately not much experimentation). He thought that the part of the soul that thinks might be able to live on after the body but that at least some of the soul was dependent upon the body (note that Aristotle’s soul isn’t at all like the Platonic/Christian conception we’re familiar with and could charitably but plausibly be updated into something people here would be comfortable identifying as a person sans body).
No, I agree there was a meaningful question there: “why have the things we (historically) labeled as ‘dogs’ seem so similar to us?” And you can meaingfully answer that question, in a way that improves your map of the world, by looking at how things got into the dog category in the first place, and why that category (regardless of name) even exists.
While I admit I don’t have special expertise on Greek philosophy in this area, I do know that they had not gathered enough evidence at that point to even be asking questions that require knowledge of evolution to answer, and that they were hung up on idealism (as opposed to nominalism) which forces you to think in terms of ideal forms rather than models that identify relevant clusters.
So perhaps EY’s characterization of the situation misled me, but the essential features are still there to support my claim that Plato went astray by not recognizing the source of the classification-as-dog.
I see. I guess we were disagreeing with Anna for somewhat different reasons. Your point is that when Plato was considering the question “why do the things we call dogs resemble each other” the concept the English word dog references was just a folk concept that was applied to some things that looked the same- the causal-historical story for how those things came to look the way they do is irrelevant to the fact they’re called the same thing just because our brains classify them the same way.
I think thats right. My point was that Plato didn’t really care about dogs so much. What he cared about was this phenomenon of resemblance. The question wasn’t so much how did discrete individuals (Lassie and Snoopy) come to exist in a way that resemble each other. Rather, the question is “We call both Lassie and Snoopy ‘dogs’ and yet they are different individuals. What then is the relation between ‘dog’ and Lassie/Snoopy and what are we doing when we call both Lassie and Snoopy dogs? But that might be more the entire tradition of Western philosophy talking rather than Plato himself.
Plato’s answer though is that there are abstract objects, “forms” which are imperfectly instantiated in Lassie and Snoopy. Both approximate ideal ‘dogness’. For Plato it was these forms that were ‘most real’ so to speak because they were eternal and perfect. Plato, and especially some of his later followers got really mystical about all this and it got imported into Christianity. But we can excise the mysticism/silly talk about perfection and get a live philosophical question (the most notable Platonist of the 20th century is Bertrand Russell). A modern version of the question might be “what is the ontological status of abstract objects?” At best evolution and genetics are only tangentially involved with that question and only for a subset of abstract objects (things like species) and as a whole the question is generally considered unsolved. As it stands nominalism and Platonism have about equal representation among philosophers as a whole, though Platonism has a slight advantage among those who do work in Metaphysics.